I’m so sorry I crushed your hopes and dreams, I promise to do it again soon

You have angered the beast

Takaoka Time

Synopsis

The sub boss opens fire and tells everyone he used to be in the army. Koro makes it to the front row of the stage somehow and directs everyone from there shuffling everyone’s positions to confuse the enemy.

He then readies Chiba and Rinka to fire at will and also tells them that failure is an option so they can have that peace of mind. So with some good decoys, Chiba and Rinka fire true and knock the sub boss out with some falling stage equipment loosened by the gunshots.

They advance up to the boss floor. Terasaka’s starts burning up and Nagisa notices, but he tells Nagisa to keep it quiet so not to slow anyone down. They make their way into the boss room and sneak up on him with the aim of grabbing the detonator that is attached to a bomb on the antidote. But the boss came prepared with multiple detonators.

And it turns out that the boss is Takaoka. After that humiliation during his tenure as teacher, he’s back for revenge especially against Nagisa. He leads them to the roof and with the threat of being able to blow up the antidote, he calls for Nagisa to follow him onto the helipad. On the helipad Takaoka blows up the connection stairs leaving him and Nagisa alone.

He demands Nagisa to prostrate and apologise, and then he steps on his head and laughs as he chucks the antidote away and blows it up.

Full of resentment, Nagisa picks up the knife in front of him vowing to kill him.

Thoughts

And finally, we have some much needed tension. The threat of death for all our lovable students has finally become a reality for them with the hope of a cure blown to pieces.

The first part against the gun licking sub boss wasn’t as convoluted as I had wanted, but it was good enough, especially with Koro as director. It returns to what assassination classroom’s good at, action comedy, leaning more to the latter. Like the weird names/facts that Koro used to refer to his class by to confuse the gun licking guy and some very well placed shots that knocks him out. And background stories for the class snipers were very welcome, even if it was only brief.

And then we get to the boss to realise that it’s Takaoka. Believe it or not, I did actually guess it could’ve been him when that gun licking guy mentioned he used to be in the army. It also makes sense to bring back an old enemy rather than creating a completely new one. It has more impact for one thing, and it also cuts out the need to come up with some reason for us to hate the character with an already annoying premise of a character to work with and build on.

To begin with, if it was any other bad guy, we probably wouldn’t care that much, but here with Takaoka it’s almost like an evolved boss guy we’re dealing with. Someone who now has a much deeper hatred for the class rather than someone who just wants to kill Koro and get the money. It makes things much more interesting.

Especially the fact that Takaoka isn’t bound by any rules and is willing to use any trick in the book to get what he wants, including putting all the children’s life in danger just to get a kid to apologise to him. Quite pitiful indeed, and yes a very underhanded tactic. But that makes this scene so much more powerful than just some other random villain.

We as the audience know that blowing up the antidote isn’t the end of the class, otherwise this show’s just turned extremely dark, which I doubt will be the case. The same can’t be said for the cast in the predicament and this sequence of events forces Nagisa into quite a dilemma. As much as I’d like to see him punch a few more holes into Takaoka’s smirking face with the knife, I would admit that Takaoka will have won the moral victory and led class E down a path of darkness.

However, if you recall, I wondered about this surefire kill method thing that Nagisa learnt from Lovro a couple of episodes ago. This has got to be the time when he reveals this. And I for one am looking forward to what he has up his sleeve. Also to see how the class climbs itself out of this hole.

And one more thing, when they do win against Takaoka, I really hope that Karma will stick some wasabi up his nose and leave it there. That would make my day.